Month: October 2019

October 24 2019

Soundfield -How A Tribe Called Red Blends Pow Wow with Electronic Music (feat. Iron Boy) – YouTube

Jenny Odell, How to Do Nothing – XOXO Festival (2019) – YouTube

Computer games designed as stories are much simpler. They don’t do much on their own. They don’t have missing parts. They are a missing part. What they become is entirely up to the user. And it is in this becoming that games-as-stories differ from games-as-systems. They may not be very significant by themselves, but they have limitless potential for growth. As they become part of the human who interacts with them.

If games-as-systems are big machines that allow you to play a little cog, then games-as-stories are little cogs that want to find a place in the big machine that is the user. The system-machines require the cog to change and adapt, to try and become as perfect as itself. The little stories-cog does not change ever. But when it becomes part of a user-machine, it causes changes in that machine. And these changes know no boundaries.

Of cogs and machines

October 4 2019

Canadaland’s The Commons podcast is doing a series of the Family Dynasties of Canada. The first episode of the series was about the Stronachs and the latest is about The Irvings.

In Defense of Bad Flags – Vlogbrothers – YouTube

Five Years of Tech Diversity Reports—and Little Progress | WIRED
Other companies don’t release their attrition numbers, but a 2017 report from the Kapor Center found it to be a big problem across the industry. That report surveyed over 2,000 tech employees who left their jobs, and found many people of color felt they had unfairly been passed over for a promotion or faced stereotyping. A recent survey by diversity nonprofit Girls Who Code revealed that many women who applied for internships at tech companies said their interviewers asked inappropriate or gender-biased questions. Others reported being flirted with, dismissed, or demeaned.